


Now There's Only Love in the Dark

by PanBoleyn



Series: Witch Oil and Marsh Fire [2]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canonical Character Death, Discussion of Canonical Suicide, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, The Characters Are Ours Now, Working Toward A Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-24 22:07:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20365864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanBoleyn/pseuds/PanBoleyn
Summary: What a strange fucking world he’s woken up in. What a fractured world, everything he’d wanted blown away in a shower of golden sparks.In our last timeline, everyone got to live. In this one, Eliot and his daemon wake up in a world without the one person they'd most wanted to see - but they aren't about to just accept that and move on.Companion fic to Turn Around, Bright Eyes





	Now There's Only Love in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> And so my daemon multiverse commences! I have plans for this one, hope you enjoy!
> 
> To those reading Shine Through My Memory, that project is still ongoing and won't be delayed by this one. 
> 
> Eliot and 23 both have opinions on Julia and why she isn't helping. They are not reliable narrators. We'll find out why she's not here further on in the series.
> 
> The spell used is not mine, it comes from Stephanie Dray's Cleopatra Selene trilogy.
> 
> As ever, thanks to my RAO enablers!

** _(i) say your goodbyes but darling if you please, don’t go without me_ **

Eliot knows the moment he wakes up that something is very, very wrong. Because the first thing he sees is Margo in the chair beside his bed, smiling her brave smile. The one that says something bad’s happened but she’s putting a brave face on it. Also, Talaus has Cythera actually pinned, which he only does when he and Margo are terrified of how Eliot and Cythera will react to something.

Eliot slowly turns his head to check the other side of the room, hoping to find Quentin and Ariadne there. But the chair is empty, there’s no sign anyone has been there. And somehow, Eliot already knows what has Margo looking the way she does.

“Eliot…” Margo says, drawing his attention back to her. “Hey, you’re all right, everything’s going to be all right.”

“Is it?” Eliot asks, and Margo takes a shaky breath. “Bambi, just tell me now. It’s either as bad as I think or… or I’m working myself up over nothing.”

“I -” Margo stops, swallows hard. There are tears in her eyes. “Alice, 23, and Quentin went to the Mirror Realm to banish the Monster Twins. Things went wrong there, and Quentin had to cast. He didn’t - he didn’t survive the backlash, Eliot. I’m so sorry.”

Something goes -  _ funny _ \- with the world as Margo’s words sink in. There’s a roaring in Eliot’s ears and behind it all he can hear is Quentin saying  _ “Eliot?” _ like he’s stunned, like he can’t believe it, hopeful and afraid to hope. The last thing he’ll ever hear Quentin say to him, Eliot realizes now, and from the look on Margo’s face hysterical laughter was not the reaction she expected from him but it seems to be the only one he has.

Of course, the laughter turns to sobs and when the sobs turn to a scream, Lipson is there with a syringe and everything goes mercifully black.

But sedation can’t last forever, and when Eliot next wakes up, he stays awake. There’s - it’s like a thin sheet of glass, between him and the rest of the world, even Margo. They give him a standard wooden cane and it’s the work of a moment to change it into the cane he’d found at the summer market, the one that -

_ "El, for God’s sake, stop leaving your cane in the middle of the floor!” _

He slicks his still-long hair back for the funeral, his tie is impeccably knotted, his suit is perfect and entirely black. Ha. Funeral. There’s no body to bury, so all they can do for Quentin is a bonfire, and a fucking song. Eliot doesn’t know who picked the song but whoever it is has weird fucking taste in appropriate songs for, for mourning.

There’s a peach in his pocket. Eliot pulls it out, holds it up to his face to inhale the scent. Thinks of the first time Arielle came to the Mosaic, thinks of her making them promise to take care of each other. Thinks of another peach, and memories flooding back in the throne room.

_ “We… we work.” _

_ “Why the fuck not?” _

_ “That’s not me, and that’s definitely not you. Not when we have a choice.” _

_ “You knew. You knew this was a moment that truly mattered and you just snuffed it out.” _

Eliot tosses the peach into the flames and watches it burn, thinks his heart is burning with it. And he barely felt Margo holding his arm, supporting him, she’s still on the other side of the glass. But of all people, Alice Quinn offers Eliot her hand to hold, and she feels real in a way no one and nothing else does right now.

Maybe because the look in her eyes almost echoes the void at the very center of him. Maybe because Julia’s falcon might be soaring with Alice’s unsettled daemon as a hawk, but when the golden daemon comes down again, he becomes a large cat who settles on Cythera’s other side. And though Talaus growls softly, Cythera doesn’t seem to mind at all.

It’s Alice who tells him the truth, two nights later, the pair of them sitting on the little patio in the middle of the night. All Eliot has been told is that Quentin sacrificed himself to fix the Seam-mirror and banish the Monster Twins, that he didn’t make it out. And he’s wondered, of course he’s wondered. But it’s Alice who tells him, quietly, “He stopped running. Halfway across the room. He stopped. And let the sparks take him. And Ariadne, she was at the door but she just - dissolved too. 23 and his eagle wouldn’t let me and Perdix try - we would have tried to save them but -”

Perdix and Cythera are lying at their feet, and Eliot’s started to get the hang of how to tell Perdix’s shapes apart - he’s a leopard right now, even though the rosettes are only a slightly darker shade of gold than the rest of his fur. At Alice’s words, Cythera voices the cry Eliot can’t, his throat so tight he’s surprised he’s not suffocating, and Perdix turns his head, grooming her fur. He isn’t Talaus so it’s a surprise that Perdix can soothe her, but then Talaus feels too big these days, when all Cythera wants is a smaller cat curled into her side.

When all Eliot wants is  _ Quentin _ .

Perdix is bigger than Cythera, but not… obnoxiously bigger. Somehow, it’s easier.

But then Margo declares she’s going back to Fillory. No - she declares that she and Eliot are going back to Fillory. “You need to get out of here, Eliot, this isn’t good for you, and I need you.” She looks around the room he’s been sleeping in with a dark frown - this was Quentin’s room, and it’s probably not a great idea, fine. But most of the clothes in the dresser still smell like him even if the bed doesn’t anymore. There’s a jacket draped on the room’s only chair, like its owner had meant to come back for it later, a book sitting open on the oversized windowsill.

And there’s a book in Eliot’s hands, because Alice hasn’t given Zelda an answer yet but she’s used the opportunity to slip out a few books. Ones that might help. Margo snatches it out of his hands when Eliot doesn’t answer her, staring at the cover. “Eliot. No. No, you are not going to lose yourself to this, we are going back to Fillory and we are getting my throne back, we’ll get you a new crown if you want, you are not doing this.”

“I’m not doing what, Margo?” Eliot asks, and when Talaus approaches Cythera she hisses, low and quiet. Talaus goes still, except for his lashing tail. Eliot feels something building, like spiderweb cracks spreading through that thin glass still keeping him apart from the world. “What am I not doing, Margo?”

“This!” Margo waves the book around in the air, one of several Alice found about the Underworld, about necromancy and ways to bring people back from the dead. “Look, if you and Alice are, are bonding in grief, OK, fine, but this is  _ crazy _ !”

“Why?” Eliot demands. “Alice was dead, she’s back, her first body is still fucking buried in Whitespire’s gardens. The only reason she and Julia didn’t manage to bring back our Penny is because magic was out at the time and god magic only works for the people it’s given to.” He hadn’t known that second story until Alice told him, last night on the patio in the dark.  _ “Maybe I could manage the spell this time,”  _ she’d whispered, Perdix a margay perched on the patio rail and Cythera pacing behind them.

“Alice was a Niffin, not all the way fucking gone, Penny was astral projected out of his body when he died, and no one knows if that spell would really have worked! Eliot. I know you’re grieving, I know you miss him, but Quentin’s dead. Not a Niffin, not floating around as a projection,  _ dead _ . You have to let him go.” Margo grabs his hands, eyes even wider than usual, and she’s half-pleading with him. Eliot pulls his hands away.

The spiderweb cracks widen and explode - metaphorically, but also, Eliot sees the mirror shatter on the wall behind Margo, watches their reflections split into shards. Did he do that? He must have done, but he hadn’t realized. “You’re right,” he says, and his voice is… strangely gentle, somehow. Gentle and cold, as if any emotion, any true inflection, will break more things in the room.

Maybe it will.

“Quentin’s dead. But why, Margo?”

“Because he fucking killed himself just when everything was all right again like an idiot. He _ killed himself _ , Eliot, don’t you dare risk yourself for him again when he chose to die! Just like he chose to lock himself up with that thing, and look what happened to you because you had to save him! Don’t do this aga-”

“Margo. Margo, stop,” Talaus says hurriedly, but it’s already too late, isn’t it?

Eliot stares at Margo, and he doesn’t - she’s still Margo, still his Bambi, and how does she not understand? Well. She’s supposedly in love with Josh Hoberman of all people now, and he doesn’t understand that at all, even allowing for the fact that he hasn’t been around. “He’s dead,” Eliot says quietly, “because no one saw him slipping away until he was already gone. I know it, because I dream it every night. I see the things the Monster did, I see blood on Quentin’s face and my hands around his throat, I can feel how easy it would be to snap his neck or choke the breath from him. I know he dared the Monster to do it because I hear him say it. And I asked Julia, it’s a true memory. He’s dead because apparently when I’m not here no one fucking notices him spiral, and everyone just let him go to the one place where a  _ fucking minor mending could kill him! _ ”

Margo goes white. “Don’t you dare blame -”

“Why the fuck not?” Eliot snaps. “I’m not going back to Fillory, Margo. Not now. Maybe it won’t work. Maybe it’ll kill me. But if I was dead and Quentin was here, he’d try for me, and you’d help him, for me. Will you help me for him?”

“I don’t want you to die again. Come back with me, you can heal from this.”

“No, then.”

“Eliot -” Margo begins, as Talaus tries to approach Cythera. But Eliot holds up a hand, and Cythera steps away from Talaus, not growling but her fur bristling, a clear warning not to touch.

“He was the love of my life,” Eliot says, very very calmly, because if he isn’t calm he’s going to scream, and possibly make things explode. He can feel his power sparking inside him, the only thing left to fill the hole at his center. And oh, it’s filling it, and slipping beyond his grasp for the first time in years. “And he asked me to be with him, for us to be together, and I told him no. I didn’t only tell him no, I told him he didn’t even mean it. And he let me, and he didn’t stop being my friend after though he’d have had every right.” He remembers Quentin, letting Eliot pull him close in that hallway, his sad puppy frown when Eliot told him to go be life partners with someone else.

“I never got to tell him I lied to him, Margo. I only got to see him for moments when I broke free. I can’t - if there is any way that won’t be the last I have of him, I have to take it. Because he’d do it for me, and because I can’t bear it. Do you understand that?”

_ “If I ever get out of here, Q, know that when I’m braver it’s because I learned it from you.” _

Margo’s eyes are shiny, but she shakes her head. “No. I don’t. Because he’s gone, El. He’s already gone, but you’re still here. I don’t understand anything that could get you killed, not when you barely survived the Monster. Quentin wouldn’t want you to risk yourself for him, you know he wouldn’t.”

“No, he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to bother anyone to ask for help either, though. And look what happened. I’m not letting the story end here, Margo. Now, you can help me, I hope you will. Alice isn’t as bad as I’d come to think, but we’re still not quite sure what we think about each other. I want you with me, Bambi. But…” Eliot shakes his head. “You can help me, or you can do your own thing, Fillory or something else, whatever you need to do. But the one thing you can’t do is stop me.”

Margo goes back to Fillory alone. Eliot wishes he was surprised.

  
  


** _(ii) bound by the life you left behind_ **

“Is there something we can do for you, 23?” Eliot asks when he notices the other man hovering, not looking up from the scroll he’s reading. Alice is writing something down and he’s going over spells that supposedly come from  _ The Book of the Dead _ (yes, that’s a real thing, a magician worked on  _ The Mummy _ ), other books and papers spread out around them. 

Alice is all but certain at this point that she can pull off the bone-knitting spell for Quentin and Ariadne, the trick is finding their spirit to be summoned when she’s done, so that’s where they’re putting their focus right now. Cythera and Perdix lie side by side - Perdix is a lion today, big and warm, Cythera tells Eliot she likes to have a companion big enough to make her feel small though he doesn’t know if she’s said as much to Perdix. 

Cythera is used to Talaus, but Perdix is a comfort now because he feels almost as lost as she does. Eliot knows, because he’s listened to the daemons whisper together, that Alice and Perdix had wanted to finally be friends with Quentin and Ariadne, the friends they’d almost been before tumbling straight into a romance none of them had been ready for. That they had wanted that, so very much, and now… Alice and Perdix are only here, to start, because of Quentin and Ariadne, after all.

As for Eliot and Cythera, without Quentin and Ariadne they aren’t sure there’s a point to anything. So the daemons soothe each other while their humans search ancient texts for something, anything, that might  _ fix this _ .

“Look,” 23 says, sitting awkwardly on the arm of the couch furthest from Alice, looking at Eliot where he’s sitting in the gold chair. “I just wanted to -” 

“Wanted to what?” Alice asks before Eliot can speak. “Explain why you didn’t know something was wrong when Quentin’s wards were always awful and you’re a psychic? Couldn’t you tell, when we were about to go to the Seam together?”

23, to Eliot’s surprise, doesn’t flinch away from Alice’s furious glare, keeps his eyes steadily on hers. His daemon is perched on his shoulder despite how big she is, as determined as her human. Eliot doesn’t know the eagle’s name, because both Pennys are the kind of people who are private about that, not addressing their daemon by name when most people are in earshot. He doesn’t care, these days. 

“No, I couldn’t. His head was - it was all white noise, I guess I made the assumption that was his way of shielding. Before he died in my timeline, he couldn’t shield at all, but, well, he had more time here, so I figured… I probably should have asked, but, well. You know I didn’t like him.” 

“Which brings us back to the question of why you’re here,” Eliot says coldly. 

23 sighs. “I didn’t like him. But look, I didn’t know what he was asking me to do. I thought he was gonna run, and part of why I thought that is because… OK, neither of you were here, but me and Marina, we did some more timeline bouncing, there was a horomancer who thought our last jump made his mother sick, it’s a long irrelevant story except, I met the other me, your timeline’s me, the dead one. He told me,  ‘So, you remember that when the moment comes, I said, “Do it.” Do what he says, OK?’ Which, no, it wasn’t fucking OK, and I told him so, but…”

23 pauses, as if waiting for one of them to say something. But Alice is watching him with narrowed eyes and Eliot just wants him to get to his point, so after a moment of silence 23 continues. “Anyway, when Coldwater told me ‘Take her and go,’ it was like suddenly I got it. So I did what he said, because I  _ assumed  _ dead-me told me to do that for the same reason I’d have told him, which is, I’d have given him a tip to get everyone out alive. I was sure that was what he did, that he’d read all the books and he was helping me to make sure shit worked out.” 

“You’re telling me that our Penny basically directed you to help Q commit suicide?” Alice demands. 

23 nods. “I think so, yeah. I don’t know why, except - him and Kady were together, right? Well, not gonna lie, if I was in his shoes? If my Julia was out in the living world? I wouldn’t have just given up even if I did eat the damn Underworld food, and if he loved Kady like I did Julia I can’t imagine he’d do differently. Unless his head was fucked with, so maybe they do that down there? I don’t know. But I figure I owe you one, because neither of you are shielding worth a damn right now, and the last thing I want to do is - well.” 

He looks at Eliot now, and Eliot wants to look away because 23 doesn’t have a right to his feelings. But he can’t. So instead he sets his jaw and stares right back, one hand white-knuckled in Cythera’s fur as 23 says, “I’ve been in your shoes, man, and it’s not something I ever wanted to do to someone. So, I should help fix it.”

“That’s very nice. Stay out of my head,” Eliot says, because he doesn’t welcome the fucking sympathy, and Penny 23 is not welcome in his head. 

“If I could, I would, but you’re practically screaming at me,” 23 says, matching Eliot’s sharpness, and actually that’s closer to being welcome, closer to comforting, than his sympathy had been. “And I won’t lie, I want to be involved because in my timeline, Alice did it on her own, and she was upset, and it all ended up so goddamned fucked.” 

“So you think you can be the voice of reason?” Alice says with a rather impressive sneer. Eliot approves. 

“No, I get the idea you wouldn’t listen. But if I can help, then maybe because I’m a little further back, I’m a fresher pair of eyes. Maybe I’ll spot shit you guys don’t want to - and if I do spot it, then that means we can fix it, and you’ll get your boy back the way you want him, not some fucked up version.” 

It’s not actually a bad argument. And Eliot is no longer in the business of ignoring a possible resource because he doesn’t like someone. Not for this, not for Quentin. He will take the help of anyone who offers if it gets him Quentin back. And Penny is a traveler. They have no idea what they might need, where they might have to go. Having the help of a traveler will make that a lot simpler. 

“What about Julia?” he asks. “Last I knew you were trailing after her like a much taller puppy.” 

23 looks away. “She blames me for choosing for her. I don’t blame her, even though I - I couldn’t get through, maybe I didn’t try hard enough, but I couldn’t break through the pain in her head to get to her.” 

“So the hedge bitch won’t be helping us, huh?” The water glass Alice brought him earlier with a quiet order to drink all of it shatters, glass flying everywhere. Luckily, Eliot listened, so no water damages the books or scrolls around them. Julia, who before she left told Eliot this was his fault, because Quentin burned himself out trying to get Eliot back from the Monster. Which, Eliot’s not disputing he’s part of it, but if Quentin burned out so fucking obviously, why didn’t his  _ oldest goddamned friend _ who was here all the time notice? When he’d asked, Julia had slapped him and stormed out. He hasn’t seen her since, doesn’t want to, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Eliot takes a deep breath and tries to force his power back down. It’s harder than it’s been since his teenage years - things broke all the time in that farmhouse in Indiana, shattered inexplicably, even before Logan and all the more often afterwards. 

_ “Matilda was like Papa, wasn’t she, Daddy?” Teddy asks, and they don’t know Eliot can hear them, when Quentin laughs softly.  _

_ “You could say that. Did you like the story?” _

_ “Yes! Tell another Earth story!” _

Eliot’s seen that movie. That kid was a lot purer than he ever was, in using his powers. At the time, the silly inaccurate comparison had warmed him, but now the memory of it is another little twist of the knife buried in his heart. 

“She can’t, she can barely do magic,” 23 says, hesitant now. “And she - I think she - people tell themselves shit, when people die, how they’re in a better place and all that. I think she’s trying to convince herself that’s true for Coldwater, since she doesn’t think she can help him.”

It’s possible that Julia is right. Maybe that makes Eliot selfish, for being willing to pull Quentin back even from resting in peace - which he can admit Quentin deserves. But he can’t bring himself to care. He misses Quentin too much, and he - he’ll make it up to him, if that’s what it turns out to be. He’ll figure out how to make it worth it. 

They just have to get Quentin back first, and Eliot will figure out what to do next once they have him.

  
  


** _(iii) I’m not messing, no, I need your blessing_ **

Alice makes Eliot come on errands with her, sometimes. The apartment they live in is technically Kady’s but she’s almost never there. Eliot is vaguely aware that she’s trying to properly unite hedge covens, and with the tiny bit of interest he can spare for things not getting Quentin back he supposes he wishes her luck. He’s been told he owes his successful de-possession in part to a cooperative cast involving hedges all over the world, so well wishes is probably the least he can do. 

It’s the only thing he has mental space for, anyway.

He remembers, more or less, when his grandmother had died. He was twelve, then, and things at home had yet to devolve into outright awful because twelve-year-old boys’ crushes can be passed off as hero worship if they happen to be directed at male targets. So Eliot remembers wanting to help, being willing for once to do his chores because his mother looked so lost and there were sad people in the house and helping  _ did something _ . 

He thinks, sometimes, that Alice ruthlessly keeps Kady’s apartment in almost too-clean order because of the same thing. None of their research is getting anywhere, and maybe practicalities keep the grief at bay for her. 

Eliot just goes along when she insists. 

He isn’t expecting to come back from the store with her one day to find Margo and 23 eyeing each other across the length of the living room like a pair of wary cats, 23’s eagle circling over their heads and Talaus tensed to spring. Alice goes wordlessly to put the shopping away, Perdix trailing her for the moment as a housecat, while Eliot stays where he is, one hand wrapped around his cane handle and the other resting on Cythera’s head. 

“Yeah, I’m gonna just be… not here,” 23 mutters, and then he and his eagle are gone in the faint shimmer of traveling away. 

“Eliot…” Margo glances away from him, briefly, towards Alice, her mouth twisting, but then she seems to decide not to worry about it. Talaus steps away from her, cautiously moving toward Eliot and Cythera, looking as small as a Siberian tiger can manage to look. Which isn’t very, but the gesture means something even so. “I - I came back to help.” 

There’s a flurry of movement out of the corner of Eliot’s eye. Alice and Perdix making their own quick escape, as it happens. Eliot focuses on Margo again, something in his chest twisting like it can’t decide if it’s loosening or getting tighter. “Did - did getting your throne from Fen not go so well?” he manages, voice rough. He should sit down, he knows that, but he can’t seem to move and it looks like Margo can’t either. Talaus and Cythera are circling each other, wary in a way they’ve never been, not with each other. 

“It’s so much worse than that actually - El, please sit down, that can’t be good for your leg.” He lets Margo help him to the couch, because what does it hurt? Except for the flash of -

_ \- straddling the back of the couch and leaning over a sleeping Quentin, impatient to wake him so he twists the cat’s ear - _

\- but Eliot is used to those flashes. They happen here a lot. They happened once outside at the sound of an ice cream truck playing its melody. They happen, and there’s nothing he can do about them, so he pretends to ignore them. 

Margo explains that she went back to a Fillory that had jumped forward three hundred years, ruled by a Dark King who apparently overthrew Fen and Josh. There’s a flash of something in Eliot then, a flash of worry for Fen, of fresh anger that whatever happened to them - and he can be angry about Hoberman for Margo’s sake, though she doesn’t seem as upset as he’d have thought - they’re too late to help. Too late, again. Too late for them, just like he was too late for Q, why the fuck is everything always _ too late _ these days?

“So how does this circle back to you changing your mind about helping me get Q back?” Eliot asks when Margo pauses in her story, hands fisted in her lap. He can see why this situation has brought Margo back to Earth, probably to see if she can get any backup, but… 

“Uh, the guy who told me. He’s a, a merchant, sells pottery in the little villages near Whitespire. When I saw the castle, he’s the one who explained about the Dark King. And, uh, he gave me a place to stay for the night, this was only a few days ago for me, but.” Margo reaches for Talaus, who lays his big head in her lap while she winds her fingers in the thick fur at his neck. “It’s so stupid, he didn’t even look like Quentin. I mean he had floppy hair and he was a nervous little thing but he didn’t - wrong hair color, wrong eyes, nothing like him really. He just - reminded me of Q. So much. I don’t know why. And I’m sitting there looking at this guy, El, and.” 

Margo looks up again, meets his eyes, and hers are shining with tears. “I knew something was wrong. Oh God. I knew. I didn’t think it was that bad, though, El, I swear. I mean, I got here and basically the first thing he did was vault over the couch to say he didn’t want to go to South with Quinn, all his usual nervous self. I thought - I was going to take you both back to Whitespire when this was over, take you both back where I could keep an eye on you, make sure you got better. I don’t know how I missed it. When he didn’t stay with me, to wait for you, that was when I knew something really wasn’t right but - but then it was too late.” 

Too late, again, Eliot thinks, but he just listens, doesn’t say anything, as Margo continues. “So maybe you were right. Or maybe I was, or maybe we all were, maybe it’s all just fucked up, but - he’d do it for you, or me, and I can’t. I can’t let you risk who knows what to get Quentin back with only Quinn and 23 for backup, not when she’s stabbed us in the back before and who the fuck knows what to make of him. He’s our boy, you get first claim but he’s both of ours, and I’m sorry I didn’t know that sooner. I’m not forgetting Fillory, but - I need you, for a fight like this I need you with me. And you need Quentin, and I, I didn’t realize how much I missed him too. So… So we get him back, and we go from there.”

Eliot looks at her. Takes one deep breath, then two. And then he’s reaching for Margo and holding on almost too tight - he knows it’s too tight, he hears her squeak, but she’s holding him just as tightly. And it’s like a dam breaks as he cries against her shoulder, sobs muffled as he lets himself fall apart. 

Because, yes. He needs Quentin back, he can barely breathe for missing him. But he needs Margo too, he needs the one person who has always been in his corner. With Margo back, things feel a little less hopeless, a little more survivable. 

  
  


** _(iv) I feel you all around me, your memories so clear_ **

It’s Margo who finds the calling spell.

“So apparently Isis was some kind of all things to all people goddess, but one of the biggest parts of her myth was how she - huh,” Margo says, making a face. “That is some kind of semi-necrophiliac bullshit with a side order of Lannisters but OK, here goes. So Isis and Osiris are brother and sister, and they’re married, and Osiris is murdered by their uncle. Guy dismembers him and scatters the pieces all over the world.” 

“That seems like overkill,” Eliot says blandly as Cythera lays her head on his good thigh, because sometimes - sometimes he needs to fall back into even this pale echo of the banter he and Margo used to toss around so easily. 

“Very much overkill,” Margo agrees, stroking her tiger’s head with her free hand. “Anyway. So, Isis wanders the world looking for the pieces of her dead husband, and when she finds them all she reanimates them for one night, they have a goodbye fuck, she gives birth to Horus who in this story is the savior of the world? Anyway, not the point. Supposedly, what I’ve got here is the spell she used to find the pieces of him, and Isiac magicians in ancient times used to say it could be used to summon the spirit of a lost love.” 

“Well, that’s promising,” Alice says as Margo hands Eliot the book. There’s just the faintest edge in her voice that makes Eliot look up at her, but when he does Alice only shakes her head a little. Eliot thinks of a mug cracking in the heat of a bonfire, a peach scorching black, and he supposes that either of them could, technically - 

But they both know it’s going to be him casting here. But it will be Alice who designs the framework of a support spell that she, Margo, and 23 will cast while he does, to give this calling all the power they can possibly bring to bear. Team efforts, here - every time one of them runs off half-cocked to do something, it all blows up. Occasionally literally. So no more of those.

Eliot looks down at the book in his hands, reading the spell. It sounds more like a poem than magic, but hey, what does he know? Religious-based magic hasn’t ever really been an area of expertise for him. 

The plan comes together fairly quickly once they have a calling spell likely to work - too many of the others require either a body part or don’t have any known cases of success. They’re going to summon Quentin and Ariadne’s spirits and bind them to a mirror, which will hold them until they can build Q a new body with the bone knitting spell. Supposedly, they’ll know the body is ready when a cloud of daemon Dust generates beside it, and at that point they can use a beacon spell to guide Quentin and Ariadne into their new forms. 

Alice looks a little bit sick when she says they’re going to put Quentin in a mirror, and no wonder. 23 doesn’t look comfortable either, and he’s the one who actually says, “Why does it have to be a mirror?” 

Alice shrugs. “Technically it doesn’t. It could be any object, but a mirror is one of the few where we’ll be able to see him, and we can communicate.” 

“What is this, Snow White and ‘mirror, mirror, on the wall’?” Margo asks, and Alice nods. 

“Actually, there’s a theory that the evil stepmother in the fairytale is based off someone who did trap a ghost in a mirror. Technically, we could do that with this first part, if we didn’t want to actually  _ save  _ Q and Ariadne. We could just… keep them there.” 

“That’s fucked up,” 23 mutters. 

“What isn’t?” Eliot says. “We’re sure this will work?” 

“We can’t be sure of anything,” Alice admits, wrapping an arm around Perdix, currently in his favorite cuddling form of a lemur. “But do I think this is our best chance? Yes.” 

“OK, someone’s gotta say it, so I’ll do it,” 23 says. “What if he doesn’t want to come back? What if he really is, you know, in a better place? Dead-me was pretty chill with his situation, and maybe that’s Underworld mind fuckery, but how do we know Coldwater doesn’t feel the same? Especially given how he died.” 

“Are you saying we shouldn’t do this?” Eliot demands.

“No, I’m saying is it gonna affect the spell if he doesn’t want to come back?” 

And, damn it, that’s actually not a stupid question. Eliot tries to soothe himself by petting Cythera, but his jaw is clenched so tight his teeth ache. Looking up, he sees that Margo is glaring at 23, expression as murderous as the one she once directed at Q the day he said he’d stay at Blackspire. Alice’s lips are pressed into a thin line, but finally she’s the one who answers. 

“It shouldn’t. There are definitely cases of people being drawn back this far and locked into objects against their will. People did it for revenge, or to power certain spells. Sometimes just to see if they could pull it off. It’s where most haunted  _ objects  _ come from, though we know haunted  _ places  _ run by different rules. And once it’s done, only the caster or an actual necromancer can release them, and the latter are rare. What we won’t be able to do unless Q wants it is to put him and Ariadne into new bodies but that’s one reason to put him in a mirror while we get that part ready.” 

“We can talk to him,” Eliot says quietly. “We can convince them, if they need it.” Or convince him, really, because Ariadne has always been the part of Quentin that  _ wants  _ to live. He’d said so himself more than once. So she won’t need convincing, but Quentin might. Which is fine. Eliot will talk himself hoarse at a Q-mirror if he’s got to. He’ll go find the damned hedge bitch so she can talk to him too if that helps, whatever Quentin needs to understand that he has to come back. 

And he’ll have Margo and Alice to back him up, so. He’s pretty sure Quentin can’t argue with all of them, their daemons,  _ and  _ his own daemon, if he even wants to. They’ll talk him around. 

Because if they don’t - if he asks them to let him go, and he  _ means  _ it - 

Eliot decides not to think about that.

It takes them a week to get everything they need for the spell, and then Eliot is sitting on the floor with Cythera at his side. They sit in a circle of symbols chalked onto the floor, the mirror in front of him sitting on one of Quentin’s shirts, folded into a square. Technically the shirt isn’t strictly required, but it’s supposed to reinforce things. 

It’s blue, and Eliot doesn’t know if it’s the one Quentin was wearing the last time he saw him, but he’s carefully not thinking about that. He takes a breath, and begins.

_ “I call you to me.” _

The first time he saw Quentin, wide-eyed and shocked, and Eliot had thought him cute from the start but… He’d been bored waiting, then mildly amused by this startled little nerd. Amused, and attracted enough to intend to take him to bed for a night if he passed the exam. But then - so strange, really. He’d caught Quentin’s wrist and towed him along, expecting a complaint or at least an instinctive jerk away, but Quentin had let him lead him, Ariadne had followed Cythera, and some part of Eliot had whispered mine, and that had been that. Eliot just needs Quentin to follow his lead one more time. 

_ “I call you by the breath of your body.” _

Eliot remembers Quentin curled asleep into his side, napping on the couch when they were students together or tucked into their bed in Fillory. He remembers soft breaths against his skin, Quentin’s pulse under his lips when Eliot kissed his neck. How easily they fit together, warm skin pressed to his and soft hair under his hands. The way Quentin would happily kiss and kiss for hours, or drop to his knees with a sly smile. Quentin petting Cythera as she purrs, Ariadne’s fur under Eliot’s own fingers, the rush of feeling when they both touched each other’s daemons together.

_ “I call you by the truth of your soul.”  _

There are dark moments Eliot remembers too, Quentin lost and afraid he’d be kicked out, Quentin with a knife in his hand in Fillory, the thin white scars on his arms. But there’s darkness in both of them, and somehow - when they were together, neither of them could drown in it completely. As if the right hand to hold might not save you, but reminds you how to keep fighting.

_ “I call you by the spark of your mind.”  _

How many times had he sat and watched Quentin ramble, bright and happy, words chasing each other and hands gesturing wildly. Eliot listened, sometimes, and other times he just let the words wash over him, just enjoyed watching Quentin lit up like that. Cythera would curl around Ariadne and they’d both purr until Quentin had to raise his voice to be heard, and it always made Eliot smile all the wider.

_ “I call you by the light of your spirit.” _

Someone good and true loves you, he’d accused his memory self, watching the throne room conversation play out. And that is the truth of it, isn’t it? Quentin, for all the shadows that kept trying to steal him - that have stolen him now - is the bright North Star of Eliot’s life. His smile, his eyes, his reckless bravery. Someone who managed to look at Eliot, see everything he has ever been, and love him anyway. Want to be with him anyway. Eliot tossed that away once. He’ll fight for it now, forever. Quentin took all the light with him, and Eliot needs him back. It’s that simple.

And the magic crests and flares, lightning in Eliot’s veins. Then - the world falls away as he blacks out.

  
  


** _(v) I walk past your room in deep silhouette_ **

Eliot blinks awake, sprawled on the floor of the apartment. Every part of his body aches like it hasn’t since his first days after waking from possession. And he’d only half felt it then, the emotional pain so much more all-encompassing. He can hear Alice, Margo, and 23 stirring, their own pained noises telling him they were slammed as hard as he was. But it will be worth it if - 

Somehow, though, he isn’t surprised to find only shards of a broken mirror and a scorch mark on the floor where the shirt was. 

What’s with it is the surprise. Puddles of black water - or, mostly black water. It is literally sparkling with tiny white lights, like someone turned the night sky liquid. “What the fuck is that?” 23 asks, the question echoing Eliot’s own thoughts. 

“I don’t know, but we should keep it and find out,” Alice says, and she gets up stiffly with Perdix’s help, finding a bottle. “Eliot, can you siphon that up?” 

He doesn’t want to. He wants to smash the pieces of mirror into even smaller pieces, grind them with his bare hands till there’s nothing but glittery dust and blood. This was supposed to work. This was supposed to bring Q’s spirit back at least, he would at least be there in the mirror to talk to until they built his body. But instead there’s this shimmering liquid that Alice thinks they should keep. 

Eliot sets his jaw and with a careless flick of his fingers, the liquid floats up and into the bottle Alice holds up. Another flick, and the mirror shards are in his palm. They don’t ask him why, he notices as he turns and leaves with Cythera at his side rather than speak to any of them. Even Margo and Talaus don’t say anything, not now, though he’s sure they’ll check in later. He goes back to his room, the room that was Quentin’s first and should belong to both of them now. He considers closing his hand tight around the shards, letting the sharp edges bite into his skin. 

There’s still a jacket draped on the chair that isn’t Eliot’s. He hasn’t moved it since he moved in here. Something in him needs the illusion that Quentin might walk back in anytime and pick up his jacket, brush off the amber-colored hairs where his daemon must have rubbed against his arms and chest. Eliot can picture it so clearly - Ariadne was just enough bigger than a housecat that cuddling her always looked just a tad awkward, but she and Quentin were always cuddling anyway. 

Once, in a lifetime that is at once painfully real in his memory and no more than an achingly vivid dream, Eliot would cuddle her too, while Cythera would lay on Quentin and he would laugh about it. 

Eliot opens his fingers and murmurs a spell, stirring the air with his other hand. The shards float up above his palm, spinning and merging until they form a smooth band, a ring like a mirror until another whispered spell frosts it over so that it’s not quite so reflective. There are colored flecks in the frost, amber like Ariadne’s fur and the warm brown of Quentin’s eyes. Eliot stares at the floating ring, then plucks it from the air and slips it onto his right ring finger. Second marriage rings go there, in Fillory. 

Their wedding rings had been copper, he remembers the feel of Quentin’s between his fingers before he’d slipped it onto Quentin’s hand, remembers the press of his own ring and the way Quentin smiled when he put it on him. Eliot flexes his right hand and looks at the ring that sits there now, a mirror reflecting Ariadne and Quentin both back at him, in a way. Isn’t that fucking poetic. 

But it’s all he has, isn’t it? A ring he made himself on impulse, the clothes and belongings Quentin left behind. A few strands of fur for Ariadne. It’s all he has of them, there isn’t even a grave for a body and a jar of daemon Dust to be buried in, because there was no body, no pile of Dust, there was nothing left of them.

Eliot still doesn’t pick up the jacket. He takes a shirt from the drawer instead, and it’s a bit musty now but it still mostly smells like Quentin when he hides his face in the cloth. He falls asleep like that, the same way he falls asleep so very often now, and Cythera stretches out behind him, her warmth and weight the only comfort he has left.

He dreams of Quentin. Of course he does. He always does. 

_ “You don’t have to do this,” says Quentin, too thin and pale even in his light blue shirt, his hair too short and oddly darker than usual. This is the worst dream-Quentin, the echo of the last time Eliot saw him. They’re at the table on the Cottage patio, where Eliot once told Quentin that he wasn’t alone. “I chose to die, El, you can just let me go.”  _

_ “You sound like Margo used to.”  _

_ “Maybe she was right the first time.”  _

_ And suddenly Eliot’s angry. He’s angry, and he knows this is a dream but he grabs Quentin by the front of his shirt, yanking him out of the chair and shaking him. “Why? Why did you do it? Damn it, Q, why couldn’t you just hang on a little longer! I tried to tell you, I tried to tell you to hang on for me, that’s what I meant that day. Peaches and plums, so you’d know it was me and you’d know I was sorry, that I wanted us, that -” _

_ He hadn’t known how bad it was, how could he know with only a moment to take Quentin in, but he’d known things weren’t good. “I dug into that thing’s mind so I could get out and get back to you, but you were gone. I’m not letting you leave me now that I’m here to fight for you, Quentin. So you can just shut up and stop trying to make me, you got that?” _

Eliot wakes up, and rolls over to stare at the white ceiling, wondering how often Quentin laid in this bed after a fucked-up dream and did the same. Sometimes he thinks he makes things worse, sleeping in Quentin’s room, but the thing is it’s the only place he still feels - close to him. Eliot wonders if Quentin did anything like this on the Mosaic, after he’d died there. Wonders if Quentin understood what he was doing, in those last moments. 

Alice doesn’t think he did, Eliot knows.  _ “He promised we’d do it together, I think he meant it - until the moment he didn’t. And he did run at first, it was like he changed his mind partway across the room.”  _

A hesitation, in a moment when that was all it took to be over. Eliot likes to hold onto that thought, because he remembers that Quentin came to Brakebills fresh from a stint in a hospital, having checked himself in so he wouldn’t hurt himself. He remembers Quentin with a knife, during their first year on the Mosaic, Ariadne arguing with him and Eliot waking up and making Quentin promise not to do that.

Does Quentin remember that promise, wherever he is? Eliot doesn’t know, but he holds onto the idea that Quentin only hesitated, rather than actively decided he wanted to die. Eliot can understand that, has certainly had times himself where he would have let himself die. He remembers admitting as much to Fogg, how he’d thought becoming High King would actually end with his death. If Quentin only hesitated, maybe he regrets it. Maybe he wants to come home. 

“How much longer can we do this, Cythera? If it hurts this bad when a spell goes wrong…” he whispers, reaching for his daemon. 

“Are we ready for how it will hurt to let them go, El?” she asks, nuzzling his face. Eliot turns, hiding his face in her fur and not even bothering to fight the tears. Not with his daemon.

“No,” he admits. He’ll never be ready for that, he doesn’t think. He’ll keep trying, however long it takes. And if the end result is that he joins Q instead, well. Eliot would much rather prefer to live, prefer to bring Quentin back to the living world and be together here. But if trying to do that lands him with Q in the Underworld instead, that’s… not the worst option he can think of. He won’t seek it, doesn’t  _ want  _ it, but if it’s that or giving up on having Quentin back entirely, he’ll take it.

That, however, is his little secret. Well, his and Cythera’s, and they don’t even need to speak of it because they both know it. Quentin and Ariadne would probably be disappointed in them for that. Oh well, is what Eliot thinks of that. He promised to be braver and he will be braver, all of this is about fighting for Quentin in any way he can find the way he saw Quentin fight for Alice, the way Eliot’s been told Quentin fought for him when he was possessed. But letting them go is a kind of bravery he and Cythera just - don’t have. 

  
  


** _(vi) you pray your dreams will leave you here_ **

The trouble is, after the rite fails, they can’t find anything else. Or rather, nothing that doesn’t involve body parts they don’t have because Quentin didn’t  _ leave  _ a body. “What I’m getting from this is that most necros take up grave robbing as a hobby?” Margo says in disgust one day, shoving a book aside. “This is bullshit.” 

“If we had that vial of blood Quentin gave to that witch -” Alice begins. 

“Except Fillory’s time-jumped three hundred fucking years and magic or no, I doubt that bitch is still alive or would still have blood that old if she was,” Margo counters. 

“Could we tap a different timeline?” 23 suggests, which is no surprise as it’s coming from him. “Before Coldwater died in one of them, I mean, get a blood sample or something from him?” 

“Maybe, but the chances of being able to both jump timelines and go back a couple of years to find Quentin before he dies are slim, and a timeshare spell won’t work because you can’t bring anything physical back with you,” Alice says with a frustrated sigh. “I just don’t know what else to do at this point.” 

“Well, there has to be something!” Eliot snaps, voice harsh, and they all turn to look at him. He can’t stand their eyes on him, he can’t fucking stand it, and he’s got his cane in his hand and he’s on his feet before he thinks about it. Stalks to the patio door and goes outside, Cythera at his heels. The frosted-mirror ring on his hand flashes in the sunlight as his hands come up to grip the rail, knuckles going white as he holds on. 

“Damn it, Q,” he whispers. “Why did you do it? Why like this, so there would be nothing left of you to save you with? I’m trying, baby, but you didn’t leave me much to work with.” 

“There has to be something,” Cythera echoes his own words back to him. “It took us forty timelines to kill the Beast, but there was a way. There was always a way. We’d have found it sooner if Fogg and Jane Chatwin had actually been willing to tell us what had already failed to work. Margo found a way to get the one thing that could save us from the Monster, when Julia was a goddess she remade all the keys after Alice destroyed them. There’s always a way.” 

“The question is how the fuck do we find it?” Eliot sighs. 

He dreamed of Quentin last night, like he dreams of him every night. But this dream - it had been different, somehow. Quentin with longer hair like right at the end of the quest, tied back the same way with a section falling loose on one side. Like it had done so often at the Mosaic. Quentin with that familiar hair and a familiar dark hoodie and copper rings glinting on his hands, Ariadne at his side. The two of them on a white cliff overlooking a sky like smoke and a sea like the night sky made liquid. Like that liquid on the floor after the calling spell had failed.

Eliot had watched Quentin gather Ariadne up and fling himself from the cliff into the crashing waves of a starry sea, and he doesn’t understand what it means. Probably nothing - he’s no psychic and he hadn’t taken any magic drugs, if anything it’s some kind of symbolic thing but who has time for that? It’s just that he can’t shake the feeling that it's somehow important. That it means something. 

“The spell almost worked,” Eliot says, daring, finally, to say the thing that he hasn’t been able to voice aloud. For a moment, he’d felt his fingers curl tight round someone’s wrist, someone who was following him willingly - Quentin, a gesture repeated a million times over and sometimes with Quentin towing Eliot off instead. “I  _ felt him _ , Cythera.” 

“For a moment,” Cythera whispers, “Ariadne was curled against me again.” 

“So then, if it almost worked, why  _ didn’t  _ it work? They didn’t pull away, I’m sure of that.”

A wrist shifting in his grip, fingers scrabbling at his arm as if desperate to hold on, but falling away - 

“Something took them back,” Cythera concludes, looking up at Eliot with fury in her yellow-green eyes. “Something is keeping them away from us. But - that’s a problem, El, that is a very real problem that we will have to fix. But at least we know they’ll come back to us, if we can get to them? We know that we’re not… pulling them away from a peace they’d rather keep.”

Eliot thinks of Quentin and Ariadne leaping from that cliff again, wonders what it means. 

“Eliot?” 

If he’d bothered to think about it, Eliot would have expected Margo to come after him. But, no, it’s Alice, Perdix padding at her side as… he thinks an ocelot, maybe? Smaller for once as he settles next to Cythera, but then it can get crowded here, can’t it? Alice comes to lean against the rail next to Eliot, their arms just brushing. 

“I love him too, you know. I might even still be a little  _ in  _ love, though what’s left of that’s been fading for a long time. I don’t want to give up on getting Quentin and Ariadne back either, Eliot, but we are running out of options. Most of what’s left requires a body, or at least ashes - what happened to him doesn’t even leave ash behind, I know that a lot better than I like to remember.”

Unlike the funeral, this time it’s Eliot who reaches for Alice’s hand. He’s dreamed, often enough, of firing a kill shot or using the neck snapping spell, memories of things he actually did - except that in the dream, the body on the ground is always, always Quentin, empty eyes staring up at him in silent accusation. For Alice to have actually  _ experienced  _ that nightmare of someone you love dying in a way you’ve killed people, is the one grief she has that Eliot can’t lay claim to, so he squeezes her hand this time. 

“I know.” It’s, somehow, one of the few certainties in Eliot’s life, now. He’s still afraid Margo will change her mind again, terrified of it because he  _ needs  _ her - but he’s certain of Alice Quinn, of all people. What a strange fucking world he’s woken up in. 

What a fractured world, everything he’d wanted blown away in a shower of golden sparks. 

“It almost worked,” he says, staring out over the city streets below. That patch of green that’s definitely a park - is that the park where he broke free, and saw Quentin one last time?  _ One last time for now _ , Eliot reminds himself as he tells Alice what he and Cythera felt, then turns to her. And, ah, there it is, the little magic girl, only sharper and tempered, biting her lip as she thinks through the implications. 

“It makes sense. That spell is supposed to be very nearly foolproof. It doesn’t always work as well as the caster would like, but for us to get nothing but a broken mirror and whatever that liquid is - something intervening makes a lot of sense. We could try waiting for a magic surge, casting then, but even a cooperative cast that shares the energy is… risky during a surge.”

Eliot knows this, actually. He’s been filled in on what the magical rationing did to the first years when they were turned into geese - not a pleasant thought - and on the problems since magic came back on properly but came back wrong. The Library guy had absorbed so much (and something of Quentin is in the ambient now too, Eliot thinks, an idea that makes casting both more comforting and more painful than ever) that now it flares up erratically. Which is just a different kind of dangerous than a finite amount of magic that can make spells die partway through. 

For example, there have been more cases of people Niffining out since - that day - than there have ever been, and kids whose powers come online like Eliot’s did, young and angry and dramatic, well. Some of them are more obvious than he was, and if it happens during a surge… He knows these things because Alice knows these things, and the four of them had discussed the surges and how they might affect any spells they use to get Quentin back. 

Margo had been the one to say, “Does it matter that he died in the same blast that caused the surges?” and Eliot has been trying very hard not to think about that idea ever since. 

Alice’s phone buzzes, and she makes a face at the screen. “Zelda,” she says. “I won’t be able to string her along forever. I don’t want to run the Library, I’m pretty sure it would corrupt me instead of me being able to save it, but then again if it’s not me, then whoever it is…” She trails off, blinking at the screen, and Perdix shifts forms abruptly into a small bird, soaring into the air and shrieking some reaction Eliot and Cythera can’t follow because they don’t speak bird. 

“What is it?” Eliot asks. Alice turns to him, cheeks flushed and eyes bright with sudden fury. 

“She wants to talk to me about Quentin. She says she has information that she thinks I’ll want. How  _ dare  _ \- but I have to find out what it is. Just in case.” 

How dare indeed, Eliot agrees, when Quentin died because the Library was too fucking busy policing everyone else to keep track of its own. Well, he didn’t die just because of that, but if it hadn’t been for Everett Quentin would have come home, Eliot would have had the chance to reach for Quentin, to get them both out of the dark before - 

But Everett happened, and Quentin didn’t come home, and Eliot never got the chance to try. Stealing back that chance is all he wants now, and if Alice is willing to play ball with Zelda then Eliot is willing to hold back any objections he might have to that idea. And so Eliot follows Alice back inside, settles on the couch next to Margo while 23 goes with Alice because they don’t talk to Library people alone thanks very much. 

“El…” Margo begins, Talaus carefully stepping close to Cythera and not relaxing until she curls into his side. Eliot is not quite so easily soothed as his daemon, looking up at Margo with forced calm. 

“I can’t stop, Bambi. You know I can’t.” 

“I know,” Margo says, pulling him down to lay in her lap, and for a moment this could be three years ago, when they were just second years at Brakebills, not a care in the world that they ever acknowledged. She threads their fingers together and Eliot turns his head to see their daemons curled together, cheetah and tiger twined on the rug like very large housecats, and it’s almost perfect except - 

The last time they’d had time to be like this, back when they were second years with no cares, there’d been a floppy haired first year tucked into the corner of the couch, Eliot’s legs on his lap. A golden cat curled into Cythera’s side. Eliot closes his eyes and remembers that day, and Margo squeezes his hand. “There has to be a way,” Eliot whispers. 

“We’ll find it, somehow,” Margo whispers back. “All the shit we’ve done? We’ll find it.” 

Eliot closes his eyes and he sees Quentin falling into waves like moving night skies. It means something. He knows it means something. He just doesn’t know what. And in some ways, he almost doesn’t care. 

_ Whatever you’re doing over there, I’m coming for you. I’ll find a way to you, Quentin, whatever it takes. _

**Author's Note:**

> Come chat with me at eidetictelekinetic.tumblr.com!


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